Friday, July 24, 2009

Cfp: "Phenomenology and French Epistemology," British Society for Phenomenology, St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, April 9-11, 2010.

The conference will examine the relation between phenomenology and the work of thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavaillès, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, George Canguilhem and Michel Foucault. Their work was in important respects developed in dialogue with the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Bachelard was a pivotal figure in this dialogue, always close to phenomenology without following the Husserlian path, and at the same time inspired by the mathematical sciences and passing on their significance to others. Although the two series of thinkers shared an interest in formalisation and in mathematics, in the main their paths diverged over the role of the subject in thought, and more broadly the direction taken in their response to Kant. An appreciation of these issues throws light on the route taken by the mainstream phenomenological tradition itself, and is also important for understanding aspects of the work of figures such as Foucault, whose thought was shaped by both currents.
Speakers:
Jean-Michel Salanskis (University of Paris, Nanterre)
Ed Casey (SUNY, Stony Brook)
Donny Frangeskou (Staffordshire University)
Knox Peden (University of California, Berkeley)
Kevin Thompson (DePaul University)
Johanna Oksala (University of Dundee) will respond to a panel discussion of her book Foucault on Freedom (CUP, 2005).
Information on the conference will be posted here: http://britishphenomenology.com/Conference.aspx.
Please send an abstract of approx. 300 words to David Webb (d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk) by 12th October 2009.

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)